‘A teacher tore up my Beano and Dandy. But at least I was reading’

Malorie Blackman is a Children’s Laureate for difficult times. With today’s teenagers having to deal with exam stress, online bullying, easy access to porn, vilification and pressure to be thin, she understands how hard it is to be young. This bestselling author’s books, which include Noughts & Crosses, can be bleak but she says that children now need stories that are “grittier and meatier than girls in Switzerland at finishing school”.

As one of five children growing up in Clapham, South London, in the 1960s, the daughter of a bus conductor and a factory worker, Blackman spent every day in the library but there was little literature that chimed with her experience. “I stopped reading children’s books as I had enough of ‘happily ever